Assembler Backup username preservation!

I

iriez

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Hello all!

Me (xbins) and Crunchbite (xlink kai) have been working on getting a old x-s forum scrape backup live for the last year. As we are nearing completion, I think its time to talk about doing the same for assembler. The forums are currently being scraped in full so that we may re-create assemblergames forums on a different host, just as we have done with xbox-scene.

In pursuit of that...I would very much like to open registration up to users who can prove their assembler usernames. If you would like to preserve your username, please do the following -

Generate a unique serial/gift card # here - http://generator.voucherify.io/# (click gift card / serial template then hit generate, choose one and copy). SAVE THIS! email it to yourself, multiple backups, whatever you gotta do, if you loose this I won't be able to guarantee giving you access to your old username!

Then PM me with the subject "assembler backup username reservation" on assemblergames.com and paste me the serial #. I will store everyone's response, and when the backup is live I will on a per-request basis grant users access to their old usernames.

It is crucial to do this now while assembler is still live! I will of course take username aquisition on a per-request basis after assembler has gone down (whenever we have a backup live), but there is no guarantee that I can provide you with your old username unless I have some very strong proof. Doing this Pm now will guarantee future access when we go live.
 
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Whilst it is great that we have backups of AG , im not so sure its a good idea allowing people to post / use accounts

I personally would prefer a static archival site
 
As most have shared the same opinion... Bad idea. We have full static archive if anyone needs to peruse AG data, no need for AG to be revived another time and continue to be a ghost town.

The migration from AG and the small publicity from hard4games + word of mouth from users has been more than enough to kick start the future here on OG. Time to move on, guys. :)
 
Let it die already. I've had enough of that place to be annoyed at not only Kevin but the name and whole site now. time to move on. We the active users there have moved and now call this home. If you do plan to have a dump of the site, keep it static and as is. The name ASSEMbler now leaves a bad taste in many people's mouth. (Mine included...) We don't need that association anymore with the rotten stuff that went down.
 
I don't get it. why would you want the username preserved?
 
Do not preserve my personal info. I do not give you legal permission to do so.

This isn't a good idea. A static backup will be useful for our purposes since we have OG to start something new.
 
It's not your site to revive. If Kevin wanted it revived, he'd give the database away. As much as I'm not happy about what's going on at AG right now, it's Kevin's call. Just back it up and store it in an archive.
 
I appreciate all your feedback.

I also understand that those who are putting time and effort into this forum want to preserve their efforts and ensure that they are not wasted. But this isn't a competition so there's no reason to treat it like a either-or situation. Those arguing against it, there is a equal rational opposite argument - Why would we wish to segment such a trove of information? Do we really want to fracture things further? This site (OG) was already operational, then shut down...and is now operational again...with some very questionable motives when it comes to future-proofing. How am I to be reassured that this site wont be gone in a year...again? From everything I've read about the owners position....it frankly gives me little confidence and thinking about this only builds my confidence that my motives are positive and that arguments against it come across as political to me. This is not a competition and anyone who treats it so is completely missing the point.

This is coming from someone (me) who has kept a site online for nearly 18 years now. I have all the guarantee's i need to ensure that my own forums and servers will remain live. No one else can offer this type of confidence to me. Frankly, I have no guarantee's from anyone on this forum that this forum will remain and be as vibrant a ecosystem as AG was, let alone even exist in 5 or 10 years. So it makes perfect sense to not only wish to archive, but continue on the information gathering. Also, this is a opt-in situation. No one is forcing you to use the backup AG forums when it goes live. Continue to do as you wish on a per-need basis.

MonkeyBoyJoey - I cannot preserve any of your personal information. Its merely a http scrape and PM's or any other personal info cannot be obtained. I also do not need permission to archive or rebroadcast public information, so any public posts that you have made on assembler will be contained in the backup and will be publicly visible on the archive/forums when live, just as they are on archive.org or any other backup that goes live.

For those who do not understand the point of preservation of username - Its so that you may continue to post and add content on the username originally used on AG. So dj898 ...sure, you can register a new name like dj898_new , but if the site is live and people are adding content, wouldn't you rather have your original username? If no, thats fine, no one's forcing you to take it and no one will be granted access to your account. Either people will provide sufficient proof (with a high bar) to obtain access to their original account, or that account will remain frozen with the original data intact and preserved-as is forever. Those who are opposed to adding new information - Thats fine, no one's forcing you. You can continue to view AG on archive.org or any other backup that is made live if you wish for the original content.

You guys need to treat this backup like a fork of any github project. Its pointless to complain about. The fork will happen, and code/data will be written. You can continue to view it as a fork and "not the original", this is fine. No one's forcing you to contribute code/data to the fork. No one can claim to own the original AG other than Kevin and I certianlly am not trying to do so.

I would like to caution everyone about treating this situation with a tribal mentality. Please don't make this a competition. This is NOT about obscuregamers vs AG. This is a extremely immature position to hold. Don't not muddy what is a positive intention with identity politics. This is about carrying on a non-segmented information repository. You are all welcome to abandon AG and any AG backups and never contribute, no one can force you to do so, nor will I ask you to do so. So the power is in your hands. Its really not more complicated than that and I will ignore tribal and political arguments.

I will re-evaluate the situation when we are closer to live (probably not anytime soon) so feel free to add your input here if you like and I will consider it.
 
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The reason OG1 closed was due to an issue where a user was targeted by take-two and decided to target preservation sites. They then blackmailed the user for my info even though I had nothing to do with their issues.

I then had to pass the site onto a new owner as I didn't want the risk of them blackmailing me for user info, and then everybody went back to AG. Seeing as AG was semi stable and nobody was here we felt our job was done and wasn't needed, released our html rips and left it as. I then got the domain back after OG's closing and logins/accounts. (We kept our Discord alive though.)

If you haven't looked we've already brought on board former AG staff, even the person offering to buy AG is part of the administration. We've already already released 3 WGET's of AG from different dates, have HTTRACK running, and have a custom database being built for the static AG site with seatch enabled.

This is a fresh start for all, we've worked hard and done more here than AG has in the past 3 years combined. We've planned ahead, done everything we can to make sure history isn't lost.

Is spending 24 hours + awake jumping ahead to make sure people have a home not good enough? I done in 24 hours what hasn't been done to AG in 3+ years. I've always put users first, even before myself at times. I care about preservation and have always kept plans on hold incase theres a need. I managed to bring back former AG staff/people who should have been staff, brought in content, setup plans to future proof the community as a whole. There's plans for more with news content and more.
 
if you ask me I'd rather have all my contributions deleted rather than archived coz I want it that way :p
 
dj898 said:
if you ask me I'd rather have all my contributions deleted rather than archived coz I want it that way :p
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Then you should probably go through your posts and delete them while AG is up. Honestly I don't really care, its your profile you are free to do as you wish. Just know that many backups are already made so despite your deletion of information now, those posts will likely be preserved forever.

Damien said:
The reason OG1 closed was due to an issue where a user was targeted by take-two and decided to target preservation sites. They then blackmailed the user for my info even though I had nothing to do with their issues.

I then had to pass the site onto a new owner as I didn't want the risk of them blackmailing me for user info, and then everybody went back to AG. Seeing as AG was semi stable and nobody was here we felt our job was done and wasn't needed, released our html rips and left it as. I then got the domain back after OG's closing and logins/accounts. (We kept our Discord alive though.)

If you haven't looked we've already brought on board former AG staff, even the person offering to buy AG is part of the administration. We've already already released 3 WGET's of AG from different dates, have HTTRACK running, and have a custom database being built for the static AG site with seatch enabled.

This is a fresh start for all, we've worked hard and done more here than AG has in the past 3 years combined. We've planned ahead, done everything we can to make sure history isn't lost.

Is spending 24 hours + awake jumping ahead to make sure people have a home not good enough? I done in 24 hours what hasn't been done to AG in 3+ years. I've always put users first, even before myself at times. I care about preservation and have always kept plans on hold incase theres a need. I managed to bring back former AG staff/people who should have been staff, brought in content, setup plans to future proof the community as a whole. There's plans for more with news content and more.
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This is all great info Damien and makes me happy to hear. And im grateful that Bad_Ad84 is going to contribute (at least I assume thats who you mean?).

Ultimately, what the people want will determine what will happen. I have literally no say in this. I will make a forum available, and if people wish to use it they may. I suspect most people will migrate here and use this site as there was already a migrational effort from AG to here anyways over the last 3-ish years. You guys launched at the right time, built the userbase, etc. But the closure and the re-opening does not inspire confidence to me on the long term stability of this place. And frankly I think the people arguing against what im proposing simply don't understand how all of this works. Either people will see value in what I provide and use it, or they wont. Its really as simple as that and there need not be any further complication to it.

I've ran gray-area sites for nearly 20 years and none of them have ever shut down or been shut down. So frankly I just don't understand the prior outcomes here with OG. If your forums are properly moderated and you have rules that account for most use-case scenarios of takedowns, then you should never have any fear or risk of having your site shut down. Preservation is great, but preservation without consideration for the complexity of modern IP laws is what gets people into hot water.

I have vast experience in this. Which is why I felt that I am a great candidate to host.

But I wish everyone the best regardless of what happens. I've ran forums before that never went anywhere and died, and I never take it personally. All I want is for the community to thrive, and for people to have the information they need. I also don't mind re-doing the work of others as leaning on others will often get you nowhere fast.

No matter what, we all get what we want. The market (end users) will decide what happens.
 
MonkeyBoyJoey said:
So only the name is preserved? No email addresses or passwords?
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That's right. The only information shown on the cloned site would be information that was publicly viewable (or that a logged-in user might see). Private messages, passwords, and that sort of data wouldn't be public, so wouldn't be scrapable.

I support iriez and others work to preserve AG content beyond that of an archive. One of the main reasons I like this idea is that techniques like modding methods and related software can change over time and become outdated. It's great to have a big archive of unique information, but it would be even better to be able to comment on an archived thread and say "anyone who got here from googling this issue should know there's a better way now and here's a link". Even if it's not a thriving community, it would at least be helpful to add footnotes to threads and such to not let info go completely stale for the next person.

I'm not an old timer on AG so I don't have experience with the management drama dampening my perspective. I just enjoy the content and would hate to see it gather cobwebs. Like that time I was asking about a rare version of an original Xbox I bought and the supply chain program manager who worked on producing those limited edition cases at Xbox at the time chimed in answered and then went on to talk about how they wound in a pinch and had to hand-squeegee decals on one of the more complicated LE cases deep into the night. You'd be leaving behind a lot of good stuff. All because the site admin threw a hissy fit?
 
While I have no issue with it with my content, just because it's public doesn't mean you have default permission to copy it.

All content copyright defaults to the creator of said content. Forums have as part of their TOS the forum has rights to republish etc.

From AG ToS:

"You are granting us with a non-exclusive, permanent, irrevocable, unlimited license to use, publish, or re-publish your Content. You retain copyright over the Content."

There is no rights to Joe random to copy the information.

Archive.org has a legal exemption to copyright to allow them to do what they are doing.

So technically speaking, you don't have the right to copy it, especially if the original poster requests you don't.

In practice, this isn't worth anyone's time to goto court over.

But just thought I'd clear up what seems to be some misconceptions of "post in public" means and what you can do with it. It's no different if someone posts a picture on their website - it doesn't mean it's free game to use without a license, unless it's specifically licensed to allow it when published.

Comparing it to a fork of github project (that is already licensed to allow forking and copying) isn't valid, as no ones licensed their content for publishing anywhere other than where they posted it and the TOS they agreed to for that site.


(again, don't take this as I have issue - I really don't care and think more places its backed up the better)
 
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Bad_Ad84 said:
While I have no issue with it with my content, just because it's public doesn't mean you have default permission to copy it.

All content copyright defaults to the creator of said content. Forums have as part of their TOS the forum has rights to republish etc.

From AG ToS:

"You are granting us with a non-exclusive, permanent, irrevocable, unlimited license to use, publish, or re-publish your Content. You retain copyright over the Content."

There is no rights to Joe random to copy the information.

Archive.org has a legal exemption to copyright to allow them to do what they are doing.

So technically speaking, you don't have the right to copy it, especially if the original poster requests you don't.

In practice, this isn't worth anyone's time to goto court over.

But just thought I'd clear up what seems to be some misconceptions of "post in public" means and what you can do with it. It's no different if someone posts a picture on their website - it doesn't mean it's free game to use without a license, unless it's specifically licensed to allow it when published.

Comparing it to a fork of github project (that is already licensed to allow forking and copying) isn't valid, as no ones licensed their content for publishing anywhere other than where they posted it and the TOS they agreed to for that site.


(again, don't take this as I have issue - I really don't care and think more places its backed up the better)
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I came over from assembler games and not fully convinced I'll like this place but willing to give it a shot. I like that you're reasonable , not surprised by it though, you've always been a straight shooter. But I've gotta say seemed kinda toxic from "we vs them" type of responses and screaming legal bloody murder. You would think have assembler backed up in more than one place is good, not to mention what he offers is to make the archive site interactive. Though I do agree the people who said they didn't want their stuff backed up should have choice, even though it might be sad vital information could be lost.
 
Agree that backing it up in multiple places and ways is a good thing, as I said.

I don't think we need any us vs them. I can understand to some respect as people are feeling defensive over "their" community and want it to continue as it was. Putting up another forum may splinter the community and therefore its not "the same as before".


But ultimately, its never going to be the same. Even if AG stays up now, it's still going to be different - just like the last time it went down, loads of people didn't come back.

We all just need to embrace that AG is over, it's never going to be exactly the same. Let's just make sure everything that was posted there isn't lost and make the best of what we have left.

Please don't read my post as legal grand standing - unless you are rich, extremely petty and don't have anything else to do - no one's going to court over some forum posts. I am just responding to the "it's posted in public, so I can do what I want" part of the thread.
 
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